White Horse (19 page)

They smile cheerfully at me from between the box flaps. I glance away before my eyes start to heat up.

On the floor I sit, legs in a wide V and pull the carton to me. It doesn’t look like much. It’s quite ordinary, really. Logically, there’s nothing ominous about a package wrapped in tape. If someone saw me struggling into the post office with this thing, they’d assume it was a care package bound for a beloved friend. It’s the contents that lend it the sinister air of a secret long turned malignant.

I have a plan. It’s been in my head since Jesse approached me on the train, but the human mind excels at withholding information from itself. Errant thoughts loiter in the less-traveled parts of our hemispheres until something triggers their leap from the shadows.

The
United States Times
. Jesse. His face pressed against the train’s window, looking me in the eye for the first time, daring me to do something bigger than clean floors and cages.

The scissors leave ragged edges on the tape. A new roll sits beside me ready to take its place as soon as I’ve done what I must.

Deep breath.

Lift lid.

Scoop a handful of pieces with a plastic Baggie. Seal the bag first, then the box. Shove it back into its hiding place with my foot.

I’m ready to do something bigger.

DATE: NOW

The Swiss corners me on
the deck. “Your stupid friend wants an abortion.”

“No she doesn’t.”

“Who are you to decide for her? Is it not her body? Americans. Every life is sacred except the lives they neglect to save because some places have no useful resources.”

“I’m not making a moral judgment. This is about her safety. There are no tools and no place clean and safe enough for any kind of surgery. Lancing a boil could be risky these days. I’ve told her already.”

“If we find a hospital, there will be antibiotics,” he says.

“You don’t know that.”

“I know more than you about many things.”

Anger rolls through me, gathering my power. I want to grab his throat, squeeze, but I don’t. Instead my elbow shoots out and up, catches him on the chin. He stumbles backwards, falls in a sprawling heap. For a moment he lies there, limbs flailing like a lobster freshly plucked from its saline home.

No one moves to help him. They look away, don’t want to get involved. Who can blame them? The ugly side of humanity has shown
its face for too long, and I’ve contributed. Shame burns me. I should have held back, but he’s done enough to Lisa already.

He flips over, jumps to his feet.

“What about when she delivers her child? What will happen then? What will happen when you deliver yours?”

Help me
, I beg of the ocean, the sky, and all the world in between. I don’t know what to do.

DATE: THEN

Athens’s Parthenon has many cheaper
, lesser cousins scattered across the world; man’s capacity to create is just as limited as it is infinite. One such building houses the National Museum, where James and Raoul once sorted potsherds. What was a mere tap of my boots on the sidewalk is now a pounding on marble tiles in an almost empty lobby. Its sole occupant is a girl seated behind the front desk, only her eyes visible over the uncreased covers and rigid spine of the Bible.

“Oh.” As though surprised that someone would choose to visit the museum on purpose. “Hello.”

She stands, brushes her pants, smiles like she forgot to perform some important task to which she is bound.

“I’m supposed to say ‘Welcome to the National Museum,’ but I wasn’t really expecting anybody today. We haven’t had anybody in for a week now. Except the staff. And they usually come in the back because that’s where our parking is.” She leans on the marble-top counter and whispers, “I’m not supposed to do this, but you can go in for free. Normally it’s ten dollars, except on Tuesdays, when admission is free, but I don’t think ten dollars is going to help much. A museum isn’t much of a museum if no one is looking. So it’ll be nice to have someone appreciating our collections. Are you here to see anything in particular?”

From behind the counter she pulls a glossy pamphlet, spreads it open to reveal all the world’s wonders. So great is her enthusiasm that I don’t tell her I know the way. Let her have her moment.

“Anthropology?”

She draws a ring around the whole east wing. “It’s huge, but it’s worth all the walking, I promise.”

She settles back into her chair, cracks open her new Bible. She’s either looking for answers or salvation. I hope she finds both.

I’ve been here a dozen times times over, delving deep in the basement where curators and their lackeys keep poky offices that are close kin to coat closets. Like a car that’s traveled the same roads pulling toward the familiar exit, my feet carry me to James’s nook. There he is in white on black: James Witte, PhD. I will not lose it. I will not cry. Weeping won’t serve anything now. And yet, as my fingers trace those white plastic grooves, my eyes are hot and damp and full.

The door I’m looking for is at the end of the row and sits in a corner, which means it’s a larger closet than its neighbors. But it’s a dead end because my knocks go unanswered. I hope Dr. Paul Mubarak isn’t dead.

But he still lives. I find him sitting on one of the museum’s many benches, hunched over a coin too rough to be modern.

He looks up, gives a little laugh, flips the olden-time money between lean, brown fingers.

“A denarius. A day’s wage for some in ancient Rome. It became obsolete in the second century, but for four hundred years, it meant something in the world.” His bright eyes inspect me, catalog me, place me on a pedestal behind glass. “We’ve met.”

“At James Witte’s funeral, yes.”

“And what has brought you to the museum today? Surely you can’t be here as a
tourista
—not when another civilization is crumbling right outside these doors.”

I take a deep breath. “I need help identifying something. James and Raoul were helping me when …”

“Then let us walk and pretend you’re here to see our magnificent collections, first. My soul is heavy with many things, least of all the new shipments for which I have no interns to torture into sorting. I will be your tour guide and hope the company of a pretty girl will lift my spirits. We’ll take care not to disturb the crowds.”

I fall into step beside Dr. Mubarak, let him enthrall me with tales of ancient Rome and Egypt. His faint accent helps me imagine I’m someplace exotic where Death doesn’t stalk.

“Sometimes I like to look at her and ask: Are you my great-great-great-grandmother?”

We’ve stopped beside a mummy whose charm lies in her age, not her current attire of rotted fabric strips.

“Who was she?” I could read the bronze plaque with its black lettering, but I’m enjoying this too much.

“Alas, my fair ancestor has no name, so we call her Grace until such a time as she can wear her own title once more. A queen, perhaps, or a princess. Someone of enough significance that they made certain her form would endure. And now, why don’t you tell me what has brought you to my door. As you can see, we are not blessed with many visitors these days. The world has problems and stares at anything but history for answers, and so the people do not come. Everything we need to know today can be found in the past. It is the foundation upon which we stand. Mistakes have been made before; they will be made again in perpetuity.”

I cannot repay this man with a half-truth, so I tell him everything about James, Raoul, and their intention to help me discover the origins of the jar. When I am finished he says, “Show it to me.”

We go into the light so he can peer at the Baggie into which I’ve stuffed several shards and a handful of dust. Several bones have made it into the mix.

“No, no, no,” he murmurs. “Old, they said?”

“Yes.” I punctuate the word with a small nod.

“No.” His sigh pushes up through centuries of rubble. “Sometimes the mind picks apart reality and restitches it to form a fabric it prefers. James and Raoul are—were—both hungry for a new, brilliant discovery that would serve to elevate their careers. Men like to pin their names to things; it makes us feel immortal.” He gives me a small, apologetic smile. “You presented them with a fascinating mystery and that lent your jar qualities it does not possess. He was wrong about your bit of pottery. He and Raoul both. That thing is not old. My wife has something similar in our foyer. People assume it’s old because of what I do. She’s always winking at me, telling them it is Etruscan or Greek.”

“And they believe it?”

“My dear, they eat it up with a dessert spoon. People believe what they want to believe. It does not fit with their worldview, you see, that a curator of archaeology would display modern ceramics in his
home. People are funny. We have changed and yet we are the same as always.”

The words thump inside my head. The jar is not old. And yet, James and Raoul believed. I was there, I saw them. Or maybe I was the one seeing what I wanted, and they were toying with my funny bone. Or maybe they thought I was tickling theirs with my new-old jar, and so they played along. They took the answer to their graves without leaving me an explanatory note.

For a moment I want to laugh, because I’d kill them both if they weren’t already dead.

“The bones,” he continues, “belong to something in the Muridae family.”

“You know bones?”

“No. I know mice.”

TWELVE

T
he mouse with the bent whiskers is gone. There’s another in its place, one whose whiskers run straight and true.

“Wow, they look great,” I say.

Schultz is leaning back in his chair, munching on Doritos.

“I’m glad this lot didn’t die.”

“Yeah.” Chip crumbs fly from his mouth. “It’s great.”

“Hey, Schultz, what happened to all those mice that died? I mean, do you guys incinerate them or what?”

“Why?”

“Just curious, I guess.” I try and look dumb. Like there’s nothing more to me than a mop.

He grunts. “We burn ’em. It used to be Jorge’s job.”

“I hope
I
don’t have to do it. Eww.”

“Don’t worry, the big guy does it himself now. Doesn’t trust anyone else.”

“Well, I’m glad of that.” My mop continues to slap the ground.

I find the jar’s siblings
crowded onto a low shelf between nested tables and a magazine rack. They’re not just brothers and sisters but clones
spawned from the same mold. The only past they’ve emerged from is a truck, and before that a factory, and before that a bag of dust.

If there really is a book of fools, both old and new, I am surely on the first page.

The label reads:
Made in Mexico
. I laugh like a madwoman, because that’s the possibility I hadn’t considered.

DATE: NOW

The Corinth Canal is a
hungry mouth cut into the landscape.

“See those?” The Swiss points to the twin breakwaters that cup the chasm, their lighthouses dead and impotent to guide ships between them. “Whore’s legs, wide open to let everybody inside.”

“Why do you hate women so much? Was your mother a whore?”

I saw something on TV once about Scott Base in Antarctica. The coldest place on earth, I remember thinking. Until now. His eyes make the South Pole seem warm and welcoming.

“My mother is none of your concern.” He taps on the railing. The canal nears. “I will tell you something, but you must not speak of it. If you do, I will cut up your friend just as she asked.”

I watch the dead stone cones and hope for light.

“Look in the cargo hold tonight. Tell no one what you see there.”

I go. Of course I
do. I can’t help myself. Dropping a mystery in my lap is like waving chocolate cake in front of a starving woman. And I am famished. Not right away, though: I wait until the dark creeps in, just like the Swiss told me, and let the shadows tuck me in their pockets for safekeeping.

My feet fall lightly on the steps; they barely rattle. Through the guts of the boat I slip, seeing no one, until I’m at the cargo hold door.

It’s not locked. How bad can it be if the door’s not sealed shut? From my pocket I draw out a lighter and hold it ready to flick. Through the door I go, though I do not close it behind me.

“Loose lips sink ships” is a lie. It’s dead lips that are going to sink this boat.

The whole crew is here for the death parade. The captain is on the top of the corpse pile, his face caked in blood, his body bent like a crude coat hanger. The others are there, too, although some are just faces without names. Someone has stacked them as fishermen do their bounty, minus the ice packing to keep them fresh.

The Swiss.

This time I thunder up the steps, not caring about a quake that pinpoints my location. I race to the simple lounge where the others are in various stages of sleep, some twitching, some snoring. Others keep a weary eye open for danger. Lisa is curled in a corner, her head cradled by our backpacks. Scan. Pan. No sign of the Swiss.

I try the door, the one that leads to the bridge. Its handle is a battered, broken barrier between the controls and the rest of us.

“Wake up!” I shout. “Everybody, up. We’ve got a problem.”

They stare at me, these sheep awaiting slaughter. Nobody bothers beating the door; watching me try and fail is good enough for them.

My mind scans the possibilities and clutches on to the most likely answer: the lone lifeboat that had hugged the rails on the port side.

It’s warmer tonight. The air stinks of salt, a smell I used to love, but now it no longer reminds me of cheerful days at the shore. Now it’s the smell of defeat and death. Here I lost my president. Here the
Elpis
lost her crew.

The ferry grinds onwards. The lights are on but they barely penetrate the dark, and the moon gives me little to work on. The only tell is a small counter ripple in the water.